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Food fight at Guantanamo Bay
SHANE MCCOY/TIME&LIFE/GETTY
UPFRONT
Detainee panel slammed DOCTORS who assist in the forcefeeding of hunger-striking detainees at Guantanamo Bay were accused last week of acting unethically, despite a government review that concluded prisoners are well cared for. Force-feeding has been used to combat hunger strikes by detainees at the US base since 2005, when over 80 inmates staged the first such protest. Hundreds of strikers have been put in restraint chairs, which have binds for ankles, wrists and shoulders, together with a lap belt and head restraint. They are then fed through a tube inserted into their nose. Those actions constitute “humiliating and degrading treatment”, which is outlawed by the Geneva conventions, argue Leonard Rubenstein of the US Institute of
Peace in Washington DC and George Annas of Boston University, who co-authored an article on the issue, published last week in The Lancet (vol 374, p 353). Human rights activists had hoped President Barack Obama might halt what they claim to be abuses at the base, but a panel commissioned by Obama concluded in February that the detainees received a “high quality of care” and that Geneva conventions were not being breached. The panel was led by US admiral Patrick Walsh, vice chief of naval operations. However, Annas points out that the panel did not include any independent study of individual inmates’ physical or mental health. “This is the main problem,” he says.
Ape airlift is off
utans dashed”. True, BHP is abandoning the airlift – but that’s because it is pulling out of the mining project too, citing a dramatic fall in world coal prices in the past year. Whether that is good news for the orang-utans remains an open question. The fear among environmental groups is that loggers, palm oil farmers and possibly other mining companies will move in on the forest vacated by BHP. Without the alternative accommodation previously offered by BHP, the orang-utans will once more be vulnerable.
–”Quality care” at Guantanamo–
Just between us
“Social networking sites that promote their privacy policies grow more slowly than their competitors” of the sites had a privacy “seal” – an endorsement of good practice from an independent body – none reproduced it on their main sign-up page. 4 | NewScientist | 1 August 2009
GEORGETTE DOUWMA/NATUREPL.COM
SUCCESSFUL social networking websites avoid promoting their privacy policy for fear of putting off potential members. As a result, people are sharing information online without caution – and without knowing how it is used. So say Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch at the University of Cambridge, who studied the privacy policies of 29 sites, including Facebook and MySpace. Although all sites possessed a privacy policy and many stressed the importance of privacy within their policy documentation, the pair found that only seven made their privacy policy prominent when soliciting users to sign up. What’s more, although seven
Bonneau and Preibusch’s analysis of traffic over a threemonth period showed that sites that made their privacy policies prominent were growing at rates significantly lower than the others, on average. They argue that this demonstrates that successful networks avoid advertising their privacy policies, because users would become reluctant to sign up and share information with other users and the site itself. “Even sites with good privacy feel that they can’t promote it, so users have no idea of what they’re getting,” says Bonneau.
SOMETIMES you just can’t win. Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton was accused of hypocrisy when it announced plans to airlift 48 orang-utans into a new wildlife reserve in Indonesian Borneo, as it was simultaneously preparing to destroy the apes’ habitat not far away with its Maruwai coalmining project. Now, two years on, it is coming under fire again in stories carrying headlines along the lines of “Hope of freedom for orang-
Killing them softly THE kindest way to kill a mouse is a sharp blow to the skull. In contrast, the classic spring-loaded mousetraps can be cruel, says a report from the UK’s Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, because they don’t always kill instantly. A study of US snap-traps showed in 2003 that rates of snagging just a tail or a leg ranged from 4 to 57 per cent. Poisoning or drowning suffer limitations too. –Do you feel lucky, punk?– The federation laments that
UPFRONT
Detainee panel slammed DOCTORS who assist in the forcefeeding of hunger-striking detainees at Guantanamo Bay were accused last week of acting unethically, despite a government review that concluded prisoners are well cared for. Force-feeding has been used to combat hunger strikes by detainees at the US base since 2005, when over 80 inmates staged the first such protest. Hundreds of strikers have been put in restraint chairs, which have binds for ankles, wrists and shoulders, together with a lap belt and head restraint. They are then fed through a tube inserted into their nose. Those actions constitute “humiliating and degrading treatment”, which is outlawed by the Geneva conventions, argue Leonard Rubenstein of the US Institute of
Peace in Washington DC and George Annas of Boston University, who co-authored an article on the issue, published last week in The Lancet (vol 374, p 353). Human rights activists had hoped President Barack Obama might halt what they claim to be abuses at the base, but a panel commissioned by Obama concluded in February that the detainees received a “high quality of care” and that Geneva conventions were not being breached. The panel was led by US admiral Patrick Walsh, vice chief of naval operations. However, Annas points out that the panel did not include any independent study of individual inmates’ physical or mental health. “This is the main problem,” he says.
Ape airlift is off
utans dashed”. True, BHP is abandoning the airlift – but that’s because it is pulling out of the mining project too, citing a dramatic fall in world coal prices in the past year. Whether that is good news for the orang-utans remains an open question. The fear among environmental groups is that loggers, palm oil farmers and possibly other mining companies will move in on the forest vacated by BHP. Without the alternative accommodation previously offered by BHP, the orang-utans will once more be vulnerable.
–”Quality care” at Guantanamo–
Just between us
“Social networking sites that promote their privacy policies grow more slowly than their competitors” of the sites had a privacy “seal” – an endorsement of good practice from an independent body – none reproduced it on their main sign-up page. 4 | NewScientist | 1 August 2009
GEORGETTE DOUWMA/NATUREPL.COM
SUCCESSFUL social networking websites avoid promoting their privacy policy for fear of putting off potential members. As a result, people are sharing information online without caution – and without knowing how it is used. So say Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch at the University of Cambridge, who studied the privacy policies of 29 sites, including Facebook and MySpace. Although all sites possessed a privacy policy and many stressed the importance of privacy within their policy documentation, the pair found that only seven made their privacy policy prominent when soliciting users to sign up. What’s more, although seven
Bonneau and Preibusch’s analysis of traffic over a threemonth period showed that sites that made their privacy policies prominent were growing at rates significantly lower than the others, on average. They argue that this demonstrates that successful networks avoid advertising their privacy policies, because users would become reluctant to sign up and share information with other users and the site itself. “Even sites with good privacy feel that they can’t promote it, so users have no idea of what they’re getting,” says Bonneau.
SOMETIMES you just can’t win. Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton was accused of hypocrisy when it announced plans to airlift 48 orang-utans into a new wildlife reserve in Indonesian Borneo, as it was simultaneously preparing to destroy the apes’ habitat not far away with its Maruwai coalmining project. Now, two years on, it is coming under fire again in stories carrying headlines along the lines of “Hope of freedom for orang-
Killing them softly THE kindest way to kill a mouse is a sharp blow to the skull. In contrast, the classic spring-loaded mousetraps can be cruel, says a report from the UK’s Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, because they don’t always kill instantly. A study of US snap-traps showed in 2003 that rates of snagging just a tail or a leg ranged from 4 to 57 per cent. Poisoning or drowning suffer limitations too. –Do you feel lucky, punk?– The federation laments that